Have you ever been using an Open Source application and noticed something horribly wrong? I have and as a skilled maintenance programmer it really tickles my fix-it bone. I know I could fix it if I wanted to but it's just so much effort. Usually it's only when a bug really annoys the hell out of me that I'll even go to the trouble of downloading the source code (or even finding out where I can download the source code from). In the rare moments that I have taken on the feat of fixing someone else's code I've found myself exercising my most mad maintenance programmer skills and I decided to make a little list.

Microsoft's chief software architect recently returned from one of his fabled "Think Weeks" full of ideas on mesh networking, unified networking and more, says eWEEK. Elsewhere, the Internet firms riding a 'mini bubble' said Gates. Update: Another one with Bill: "Hardware to Be Nearly Free in 10 Years".

Apple is now officially endorsing OpenAL and has provided a new branch of Mac OS X code which is now in OpenAL's CVS (it requires to install Apple's latest CoreAudio SDK before compiling).

Creating a popular new computing approach always seems to bring with it a familiar catch-22: security issues. And Web services is no exception.

Tudy Parghel sent us a link to the first part of Tom's Hardware's migration guide. It starts you down the path of migrating from Windows to Linux.

Test 2 of Fedora Core 2 is now available. You can download it from here or, if you want maximum speed, you can grab the torrent from the Duke LUG. BitTorrent info can be found here. Update: Great. Just spent 4 hours downloading the 4 Fedora CDs (md5sum'ed) and the first CD won't boot on a machine that is fully compatible (apparently it is a new bug, there is already a bug report about it). Fedora's poor testing before the distribution (even for a beta) continues to amaze me each time a new version is out.

Microsoft is set to release Monday a beta version of an update to its Windows CE operating system for handheld devices, set-top boxes and other limited-function computing devices. Update: Here is the press release.

With the release of kernel 2.6, Linux now poses serious competition to major RTOS vendors, such as VxWorks and WinCE, in the embedded market space. Linux 2.6 introduces many new features that make it an excellent operating system for embedded computing. Among these new features are enhanced real-time performance, easier porting to new computers, support for large memory models, support for microcontrollers and an improved I/O system.

James Chacon of the NetBSD Release Engineering team has announced that the Release Engineering process for the much awaited NetBSD 2.0 release has begun. At this time, the expected final release is scheduled for the end of May 2004. See James' message to the netbsd-announce mailinglist for details.

2CPU.com has an article posted comparing the performance of Linux kernels 2.6.4 and 2.4.25 under a variety of server-oriented benchmarks. Their Apache and MySQL results were especially interesting. It's a good read for those of us debating whether or not to update our production machines from 2.4 to 2.6.

Zaval's dual licensed LwVCL provides the same API solution for both Java (J2SE & J2ME) and .NET (.NET & Mono). This means that the same API, the same components set, the same functionality, and at last the same look and feel work on both architectures.

IronPython is a new implementation of the Python language targeting the Common Language Runtime (CLR). It compiles python programs into bytecode (IL) that will run on either Microsoft's .NET or the Open Source Mono platform. Elsewhere, "A Byte of Python" is a free book (or free tutorial) on Python. It is meant to be a guide to anyone learning Python.

Those following the evolution of the Reiser4 filesystem will be interested in learning that it has become "fairly stable for average users", so much so that Namesys is soon planning to push patches to 2.6 kernel maintainer Andrew Morton. Once the two remaining known bugs are fixed, the warnings against using reiser4 on a production system will likely be removed, KernelTrap reports.

Sun Microsystems posted some new screenshots of its Java-based Project Looking Glass.